It's News to Me

I've already given this idea to the on-duty manager of the grocery store where I shop but she probably filed it under looney ideas gleaned from talkative old men in the checkout line and did little or nothing else with it, so I'm offering it to any of my programmer friends who might want to make a name for themselves and in the process create a useful tool for crazies like me who look for innovative ways to use our Internet connection.  I, like most everybody else and maybe even you, dutifully hand the cashier my «value card» as he or she is about to ring up my purchases so that I can get the discounts that accrue from having given them my name and address and having allowed them to tag me with a unique Customer ID.  They use it, among other things, to print out a listing of the items I have purchased that day, neatly categorized into sections like Produce, Package Meat, Grocery, Frozen Food, Dairy, Candy/Gum, etc., and at the conclusion of that listing they announce that Your Savings Today was $7.48 on my most recent (9/16/07) expenditure of $56.66.  I walk away, informed and satisfied that it could have been at least $7.48 worse.

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I sometimes believe the wheels of technological progress would screech to a halt without the use of acronyms. And facility with acronyms seems to be the shibboleth that divides the technological cognoscenti from those who are lost in space when they walk into Best Buy or Circuit City. Seniors, in particular, find dealing with some pimply-faced geek wannabe who has scored a job selling the latest computers, digital cameras and MP3 players to an unsuspecting public to be an anathema. God forbid you should have a problem with your computer and have to try to determine whether that Geek Squad Savior who rode in on a white PT Cruiser is blowing smoke up your ass when he tells you you've got to buy a $300.00 component just to get your email to work again. They'll sling acronyms at you so fast that it'll make your head spin. As the old saying goes, «If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.»

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Here's the text of the first email I sent out today. (Names omitted for the usual reasons.)

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On May 9, 1961, Newton Minnow, John F Kennedy's appointee to the Chairmanship of the Federal Communications Commission, delivered his now-famous «Vast Wasteland» speech to the National Association of Broadcasters and described the state of television at that time thusly ...

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Tom Simpson has done some investigation about this new online community and says ...

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Have you ever experienced the panicked feeling that comes from dreaming that you were naked and exposed in some public place like the town square? I have, and I have heard from others who say they have too. I'm sure many a psychiatrist has been able to pay for a yacht or put braces on his children's teeth by interpreting such dreams, usually by making such clever observations as «You feel exposed.» Well, the field of psychiatry may soon experience a rennaisance, because a lot more of us are destined to «feel exposed» due to what I choose to think of as the dark side of connectivity.

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I have previously blogged about the virtue (as I see it) of being able to customize your applications to your own preferences. This afternoon I see that Daryl has made a plea for such customization of a feature in Flock, the alerts he receives from the Flickr Photo browser. He said:

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I saw this comment (#7) over on Mike Neel's blog this morning and decided I'd better post something here on my blog before such comments begin appearing in my comment section. So let me try to catch you up on some of the things that have been capturing my attention during the last week or so.

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In its editorial this morning, the New York times get it right when it says ...

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I'm a queer duck in more ways than one, as I'm sure many would agree. One of the ways in which I differ from most people is that I really enjoy exploring new software, finding out what it can do, and learning how it will permit me to tweak it to my own personal preferences. That explains in some measure why I am so fond of my favorite text editor, TSE Pro, why I use The Bat!, why I like Firefox and Flock, and why, most recently, I have fallen in love with xplorer2, a Windows shell replacement for Windows Explorer. They all give me exquisite control over how they function, and that to me is a joyful experience.

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